Down the Shaft
by Laluzi
Summary: A take on the infamous elevator scene. Contains spoilers, assumes that you're familiar with the events discovered in the Web of Intrigue.


**I don't own Prototype or the lines that I took directly from it.**

**0o0o0**

Karen Parker was not having a good day.

The term 'not having a good day' really failed to cover her situation, in truth. It didn't come close. There were more things wrong with her life at the moment than there were things right - hell, the days she _hadn't_ lived in a perpetual state of being terrified out of her mind seemed distant and surreal to her now. She was exhausted, having substituted the crap that the military considered coffee for the past four nights' sleep. Her eyes ached from continuous computer exposure. She was being openly extorted under threat of death. Her apartment was in the midst of one of the infected hot zones. New York City was struggling against a biological nightmare, courtesy of her ex-boyfriend. And she was being used to betray that particular ex, forced to manipulate the person she still loved into destroying himself. Knowing that if Blackwatch didn't kill her, _he_ would.

And that was all without knowing things were about to get a hell of a lot worse.

She was used to having soldiers barge into the apartment-turned-laboratory she was confined to. They came to check on her at regular intervals; to make sure she wasn't up to any tricks, to demand results, to taunt her and make lewd jokes that usually centered around tentacle fetishes. So when the man in standard head-to-toe Blackwatch vestments entered, she spared him little more than a resigned glance. When he grabbed her arm, dragging her upright out of her swivel chair, she'd rolled her eyes and prepared to swat him away with a barbed retort about how she couldn't do their dirty work for them while being pushed around.

Then he spoke out, words muffled and mechanical from his helmet's filter.

"We've been compromised. Mercer knows you're on the payroll. We're evacuating."

"Oh, Jesus." The woman's eyes flew wide, one hand coming down over her heart. There was nothing else to say. Betraying him in and of itself had been bad enough, but she was all too aware that Blackwatch couldn't save her from his vengeance if he ever found out.

And he had.

She'd known there was no escaping him forever, known it just as clearly as she knew New York City was going down and that she wasn't going to get out of it alive. The clues were all there; she'd asked for the materials, she'd sent him into a trap, she'd vanished right after all of it... hell, they might have even flat-out told him that it was all her doing just to try to get to him. With an entity as virtually untouchable as ZEUS, the military tended to take every jab available, no matter how desperate or foolish it was. Even if they hadn't, all it took was one consumed Blackwatch officer among the chain of command and he would have all the pieces before him. And Alex had always been good at connecting the dots.

As if in preparation for its approaching end, random scenes from her life began to flash across her eyes. Things that had led her to this. Alex Mercer had hardly been the perfect person; he'd been cold and distant, arrogant and self-centered. But she'd loved him all the same for his flaws, and he'd loved her too, as much as somebody like him was capable of loving.

The last time she'd seen him, the human him - he'd been paranoid, she'd thought, ready to release the biological terror he'd spent so many years cultivating. Convinced that some hidden organization was out to kill him, that he knew too much. She'd tried to reason with him. She'd failed.

And then the news feed several hours later. He was dead. Her Alex was dead.

The officer was silent as he steered her into the elevator, punching in the encoded sequence to activate it.

Hardly a day into her grief, the same organization he'd feared right before the end had broken into her home and kidnapped her. She remembered the harsh tang of antiseptic as she'd walked blindfolded through an echoing hallway. Being ushered into small room, a conference room designed solely for interrogation. Honeyed, empty words passed, meant to calm something that absolutely nothing could soothe; words spoken carefully with the pointed hint of a death threat lurking just beneath the surface. She knew too much, even though she knew nothing. Somehow, Alex wasn't dead. He'd been reborn, resurrected, and they wanted somebody close to him in order to deliver a final backstab.

They'd tried to smooth out her betrayal with reason. "He's not the man you knew, Karen. He's something else." The real Alex Mercer was dead, and she was working to destroy a virus that wore his face. Nothing more than that. He was nothing to her.

She'd come close to believing it.

When he'd come into her apartment, so dark and unsure, her heart had broken all over again, because it was immediately clear that she'd been lied to. He was real, he was desperate, and he'd only wanted to be brought back to the humanity that everyone save him knew was impossible. She'd realized then that she loved him none the less than she had before, despite him being so different - the Blacklight version of Alex was _warmer_, somehow more human - and it was on that note that she sent him out to gather the raw materials for his demise.

She hadn't known what would be worse - if the cancer succeeded in killing him, or if he survived and tracked her down. For pessimism, realized mortality, or obstinate devotion to her ex, she'd never thought that her ill-named 'cure' would destroy him, and yet...

...did it matter now, when her predictions had come true? When her nightmares had come true? The person who hunted her down wouldn't be the Alex Mercer who had awkwardly embraced her back in her own apartment upon their star-crossed reunion. He'd be the Alex Mercer that Blackwatch's cameras had caught in all his maddened glory, shifting his limbs into chitinous black weapons and rending wave upon wave of trained soldiers into so many spare body parts, feeder tendrils darting out and plunging themselves into his prey...

"You know what he can do! Oh, goddamnit. He'll kill me."

Again, the soldier beside her did not speak, continuing to type in a sequence as the elevator began its descent. Was he afraid of associating with somebody Mercer had obviously marked for slaughter, or was he another one of the stoic, jingoistic bastards that just didn't give a damn about what she felt? Was there any way she could ever convey the absolute, paralyzing fear that they'd forced her into? Did any of them pity her? Were they even human?

There was a jolt, like a giant's stomp; the elevator carriage shook concussively and ground to a halt. A whirring noise rang out as power failed, the wan red emergency strips overhead sputtering to life in the emergency. The old graffiti and tacked posters subsequently faded from sight. The debilitating feeling of being _caged_ swamped the scientist; the air was stale and the doors were sealed shut. She was trapped, and the elevator suddenly felt like a rendition of hell.

"Oh, my God. Oh my God, he's here. He's in the building." A hysterical gasp finally escaped her as she craned her neck upwards, half-blind in the semidarkness and flickering crimson lights.

There was a slick, sickly _organic_ ripping noise behind her, something that sent every hair on her neck standing on end. Dominos in reverse, soldiers snapping to attention.

"I know."

Two words, spoken in a low voice she'd know anywhere. It was more gravelly than she'd remembered, a hoarse edge to the velvet she recalled, but it made no difference. To anyone else, in any other context, this would have been a simple affirmative. Here and now, it was the sound of her death warrant being signed off with a flourish.

Karen Parker took a deep breath and closed her eyes. There was nothing she could say. Her heart raced as she scrambled to remember the words to a prayer - he had caused her heart to race like this before, but his words had been honeyed then, and it had been anticipation rather than debilitating terror...

But it hadn't been _him_, had it? Her confused mind had never been able to draw the solid distinction, but the Alex Mercer she'd almost proposed to was not the same person who stood behind her, ready to part her neck from her shoulders. This was Blacklight, codename ZEUS, and any one of these sluggish seconds would finally bring an end to this anguished suspense - would it be the claws, the blade, the whip? She choked down a hysterical giggle. Maybe he wouldn't change his hands at all, and he'd just strangle her -

"Look at me."

Karen Parker wasn't sure why she listened. Fear had short-circuited her reactions, and the voice was one she was accustomed to listening to - one she'd remembered as commanding. Slowly, she turned around. She didn't need to look to know that her military escort had been the Blacklight virus all along, but the glance confirmed it.

He'd changed, certainly, no longer the Alex Mercer she'd known. His once-tanned skin was deathly pale, long shadows playing across his pronounced cheekbones. Little things betrayed the truth - the deepened stress lines in his face, the dark, nearly translucent circles under his eyes. And it went deeper than his physical appearance, she knew that much. He was no longer a man, but a living weapon, a deadly virus. Blacklight, wearing the face of the man she loved.

But one look into those eyes - eyes of frost and steel, eyes that seemed to stare through her secrets to her core - told her that Alex Mercer was exactly who stood before her.

She felt like a bird, hypnotized by a cobra's stare.

There was no hint of the cancer she'd engineered on his body, no twitching eyes or limping that might belie pain. He was calm, still as undisturbed water, and that was even more threatening than if he'd advanced on her with knifelike talons or an extended blade.

His words floated to her as if over a massive distance, dreamlike and distorted. It took her several seconds to process them.

"I know what they did. I know how they found you, blackmailed you. I know you tried to fight them, that you tried to escape. I know you _tried, _even though Blackwatch got you in the end. I tried too. The difference was, I escaped. You didn't."

She swallowed.

"I trusted you. I thought I could trust you, and you sent me into a trap. I was blind. I was a fool."

"And yet," and his voice was almost soft, "I'm still here."

A few moments of shivering silence persisted; the blond woman knew that his grandstanding was over. The time had come; he was looking at her almost curiously, like a cat trying to figure out if a mouse was dead or merely faking it in its terror. His gaze was assessing and unutterably _predatory_, and she couldn't turn away.

Something lent her a last rush of fortitude, unwound her tangled tongue. She drew in a shuddering breath. "Just... please don't do it wearing that face. _His_ face. I just can't..."

"Do what?" He was toying with her. Alex had loved to mess with people's heads, always cat and mouse. She'd never expected to be his mouse.

But she didn't have the strength nor the will to fight back, to play his games. "I don't want to see _him_ kill me. If you ever loved me, ZEUS, if any of your memories ever remember loving me... I don't want to die seeing Alex Mercer rip my throat out."

His face briefly contorted as she addressed him by his codename, but a moment later he had reverted to his trademark scowl. There was a distinctly sardonic tone to his voice now, a half-condescension that she knew very well. "Whoever said I came here to kill you?"

Karen tried to keep the hysteria from her voice. "If not to kill me, then what?"

"Just to tell you that I know. That I understand."

The words didn't make sense to her, not at first. She was convinced that she was going to die, and those tightly compressed coils in her chest weren't ready to let go, just yet. "Don't lie."

"I know the whole story, Karen. I know every word they told you, every threat they made. I know your every protest, every attempt to reason, your adamancy on how you wanted no part in any of it. I know how they dragged you back in shackles at gunpoint when you tried to run for it. I know this _i__n__timately_. I don't have time to search out and kill every single person who's worked against me in this war. New York wouldn't have any people left."

"But I betrayed you." It was barely a whisper; she hardly dared to breathe.

"That's what I thought at first. But you didn't _want_ to see me dead, which sets you apart from every other jarhead that's taken shots at me. I can count the number of people who don't mind the thought of me surviving on one hand, and I really don't feel like killing you just because you were unlucky enough to get tangled up in this mess."

"I... I'm not going to die?"

He gave her a flat stare. "Everybody dies at some point, Karen. But no, you're not going to die here and now, not by me."

In response, her legs gave out.

She stumbled forward, no longer able to stand as the realization struck her with all the force of a tidal wave. Blindly, she clutched at anything, feeling like the world was dropping beneath her feet. Her hands clamped onto something both bony and soft - she was too overwhelmed to be embarassed that she was clinging onto his sleeve and right wrist for dear life, burying her head in his leather coat as she struggled not to cry.

His skin was feverishly warm under the jacket; she could feel the unnatural heat upon her own, as if he were ravaged by some sickness. Were things any different, she would have laughed at the irony. He _was_ the sickness. The virus would burn in him as long as he lived.

The situation was ridiculous - she was falling onto her would-be killer and viral reincarnation of her ex-boyfriend, trying her best to keep from sobbing in some mixture of despair and relief as she clung to him like a life preserver. He didn't respond as she trembled against him, everything in his posture speaking stiffness and uncertainty. Just like Alex. Except it wasn't like Alex at all. The real Alex would have sneered at her for being weak, would have scoffed in disgust and told her to get her act together. This one just stood there, torn and ever so out of place.

At last, he drew back. He ran his free fingers over the wrist she'd gripped - his skin was sticky with something warm and wet. Familiar and yet not. It took him few moments to realize it was not blood but tears.

"He loved you, you know."

"W-what?" She looked up.

Mercer shifted awkwardly. "Alex. The real Alex. He did a damn shitty job of showing it, but from what I remember, he did, the best he could. I... I don't know what to feel, not anymore. I was a monster then, and I'm a monster now. Can't tell which one's the worse person. But the feelings I can remember, what I can remember from who I used to be... that's all I have left of humanity. So I'll stick with them. God knows how much longer I'll be able to."

"I can help you."

It was a rash pledge, and an empty one, at that. He merely looked at her. "The last time I assumed that, I ended up with a weaponized parasite devouring me from the inside out. Can you imagine the pain as a foreign organism claws its way into you and slowly siphons out your innards for its own growth? Feeling your own body rebel against you, growing weaker by the minute? I was coughing up blood near the end, and I'm not sure how that even worked, me lacking most vital organs. It was a nice try, I'll give you that. But Blackwatch should know by now that I'm not ready to die just yet."

His tone was light, but the subject matter was piercing, and she flinched under his gaze, unwilling to meet those accusing silvery eyes. "I never wanted-"

He cut her off. "I'm sorry, Karen. I can forgive you, maybe, sometime after all of this is over and done with, if any of us are still alive. But I just can't trust you. Not anymore."

"But I never meant to betray you."

"None of it matters." He seemed to have made up his mind. "I realize my mistake. I've learned from you. Blackwatch is desperate. They'll do anything they can - grab anything they can take - to get at me. If they can't find any weaknesses of _mine_, they'll find somebody else, somebody else they can overpower and control. I can't afford to associate with anyone. Everyone's a tool that can be used against me, a chink in the armor. This is a war I need to fight alone."

His voice was flat - formal and final - as he at last looked away from her, moving towards the elevator's controls and then to the double doors themselves. "Goodbye, Karen Parker."

"Alex, I still..."

He stopped and turned around, his eyes flashing under the rim of his cowl. She met his gaze this time, desperation trumping fear. A plea, one that needed no words to be understood.

_I still love you._

"It wouldn't work." His voice was almost soft, for a moment. "It's like they told you. I'm not the man you knew. I'm something else."

With a casual flick of the wrist, he ripped the elevator's thick sliding doors off their hinges. A step forward, then another, while she remained rooted to the spot. Leather loafers clicked on the metal as everything she knew turned away. Karen Parker wanted to follow. But she couldn't. The truth clung to her like shackles, manacles that chained her to the broken elevator while circumstance wrought its merciful torment.

She could only watch as Alex Mercer walked out of her life.


End file.
